Society

Eroles Project – Deepening Citizenship

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What is the Eroles Project? I could give several answers. It is a network of change-makers connected through a set of evolving principles, annual learning-for-action residencies, an online community platform and a library of resources. It is a threshold marked by a cobalt blue door. It is a small core team of organisers, a growing number of alumni and an advisory board. It is projects and workshops that root around the world. Mostly though, in whichever form, I feel it is an opportunity to inquire.

The Terror of Deep Time

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Grasp the fact that our species is a temporary yet integral part of the whole system we call the biosphere of the Earth, and it becomes a good deal easier to see that we are part of a story that didn’t begin with us, won’t end with us, and doesn’t happen to assign us an overwhelmingly important role. There’s much to be gained by ditching the tantrums, coming to terms with our decidedly modest place in the cosmos, and coming to understand the story in which we play our small but significant part.

7 Inspirational Quotes to Make You Feel Better about Climate Change

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It’s easy to get struck by existential dread when you’re reading about climate change. Personally I think there hasn’t been enough attention on the psychological effects of this. Although you can find a few fantastic articles on the subject – such as this one from Grist. My personal favourite antidote for climate fear is to throw yourself into pragmatic climate action.

Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution

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Beautiful Trouble lays out the core tactics, principles and theoretical concepts that drive creative activism, providing analytical tools for changemakers to learn from their own successes and failures. In the modules that follow, we map the DNA of these hybrid art/action methods, tease out the design principles that make them tick and the theoretical concepts that inform them, and then show how all of these work together in a series of instructive case studies.

The Return of the Peasant: or, the History of the World in 10½ blog posts. 3. From the Ancient to the Medieval

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In ideological terms, these developments eventually resulted in an impressive intellectual and political culture of the high middle ages involving notions of corporate identity and religious transcendence – one that was rigidly inegalitarian, albeit admitting to various critiques of the established hierarchy.

Beyond Harvey and Irma

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Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name — not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that.

Data Technologies Colonize the Ontological Frontier

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Writing recently in Medium, Salvatore Iaconesi — a designer, engineer and founder of Art is Open Source and Human Ecosystems — offers an extremely important critique of the blockchain and other data-driven network technologies. While recognizing that these systems have enormous potential for “radical innovation and transformation,” he astutely warns against their dangerous psychological and cultural effects.

People are the Face of the Land: the Story of Te Uru Taumatua

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For New Zealand’s Tūhoe Māori people, a spectularly sustainable building serves as the first tribal headquarters in 1.5 centuries. Here, nature, custom and community come to flourish in harmony. When a crowd of 3,000 people moved as one to the sound of Tūhoe Māori warriors calling them, you could have mistaken it for a scene in a movie.

Before the Wind Consumes us

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I think the reason people are unwilling to change their lifestyle to counter climate change is because of an inability to recognize our dependence on the culture we’ve created. Like an anteater that evolved a specialized nose making them totally dependent on eating ants (thus as the ants go so goes the anteater), humans have become adept at using and depending on fossil fuels and technology.

Initial Report on the Transition US National Gathering and Movement Strategy Session

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The first-ever Transition US National Gathering (and the follow-up Leadership Retreat and Movement Strategy Session) was a great success! TUS staff, board, and our growing network of supporters and volunteers around the country remain hard at work integrating this amazing experience — including harvesting stories, videos, images and other artifacts — but for the moment, it feels necessary to give our blog readers at least a very basic sketch of the magic that we co-created in the Twin Cities this summer.